April 29, 2016

MacStories Weekly: Issue 30

In this issue: GAget, iOS Apps with Great Dark Themes (Vol. 2), Shai Lottem’s Home screen, the results of the first ‘Straw Poll’, a giveaway of Yoink, another installment of Ongoing Development, plus the usual Workflow Corner, Weekly Q&A, Tip, Links, and recap of MacStories articles.

MACSTORIES RECOMMENDS

Great apps, accessories, gear, and media recommended by the MacStories team.

    GAget

    When I want to get a quick glance at my Google Analytics statistics, I go to GAget. I could just use the Google Analytics app, but it’s a bit too cluttered and has just a bit too much information (which, don’t get me wrong, is great in its own right).

    Instead, GAget presents your Google Analytics statistics in a pleasing and well organised structure. It cuts out all of the advanced statistics and focuses on the key metrics that you’re likely interested to know about. GAget presents information (based on the last week/two weeks/four weeks) on visits, unique visits and pageviews, the bounce rate, average time on site, traffic sources, and a few other pieces of information.

    It means that in a few seconds with GAget I get a really good overview of how my website is doing. If I want to dig a bit deeper into one aspect of that, I can then jump over to the Google Analytics app or website.

    MACSTORIES COLLECTIONS

    iOS Apps with Great Dark Themes, Vol. 2

    OmniFocus

    The Omni Group’s powerful task manager has a striking dark palette that can be enabled in the Settings. Once activated, the dark theme will create additional contrast between the app’s pink “checkcircles”, yellow and red labels, and blue interface elements – not to mention perspectives on the Home screen. Beautiful.

    Reddit

    The official Reddit app for iPhone offers a well thought-out dark theme that relies on white text for post titles and comments, electric blue labels, and light green tab bar icons. A nice touch: the leftmost tab bar icon, the Reddit logo, is red like the app icon, indicating that it’s the button you have to tap to go back to the main screen.

    iA Writer

    What was once a minimalistic and focused text editor has turned into a quiet powerhouse of Markdown text editing on iOS, with a good-looking dark theme to boot. iA Writer can now directly integrate with WordPress and it comes with a customizable keyboard row; more importantly, its dark theme plays well with the app’s unique syntax highlighting mode for parts of speech. I love how highlighting for adjectives, adverbs, and other speech elements looks against the dark background when editing.

    Instapaper

    Instapaper is one of the finest examples of bringing a dark theme to an iOS app. There are two different dark themes in Instapaper: a black theme and a dark gray one. Both can be activated in an article’s display options but they apply to the entire app – and they look fantastic together with Instapaper’s exquisite typography and readability preferences.

    Drafts

    The fast and powerful note-taking utility by Agile Tortoise features a dark mode that will combine white text with yellow UI accents in lieu of the typical blue buttons and labels. Simple, yet functional – and with an option to automatically activate it at night.

    Weather Underground

    This app has long been my favorite weather utility because of its hyper-local approach with Netatmo weather station support. The dark theme here is one of the best on iOS: it’s tastefully balanced against other visual elements in the app such as maps and photos – but I especially like how it looks alongside the precipitation charts and sunrise/sunset pie chart.

    CLUB PERKS

    As Club MacStories members, you'll occasionally have access to to giveaways, discounts, and free downloads.

    Yoink

    Exclusively for Club MacStories members, we have 30 coupon codes for Yoink, a great Mac utility which makes it easier to drag and drop files on your Mac. Yoink got a nice update this week, which John reviewed on MacStories.

    Enter Yoink Giveaway

    We have 30 coupon codes which will be randomly given away.

    RELAX, IT'S THE WEEKEND!

    It's the weekend (or almost is) and you deserve a break. Here's something we enjoyed watching, playing, reading, or listening to.

    The Night Manager

    TV Series

    Purchase on iTunes

    The British make fantastic TV miniseries, and the latest one to catch my eye is The Night Manager. It’s a six-part espionage drama based on the John Le Carré novel of the same name and stars the fantastic Hugh Laurie (Dr. House as a villain!) and Tom Hiddleston.

    I’m only halfway through the miniseries at the moment, but it’s so good I couldn’t resist sharing it today. The story is fantastic, but it also has some phenomenal production values because the show feels like a movie – probably helped by the fact that it was filmed across England, Spain, Morocco, and Switzerland. If you even remotely enjoy a good spy thriller, you definitely need to seek The Night Manager out – I think you’ll really enjoy it.

    Speaking of British spy shows, this has me reminiscing about one of my favourite British TV shows, Spooks (titled MI5 in the US).

    TIPS

    Tips and tricks to master your apps and be more productive.

    We’ve all been there. You make airline or hotel reservations in Safari and need to share the receipt with someone. You could print a PDF to your desktop and then drag the PDF into Mail, Messages or another app, but you can skip that step altogether by creating a shortcut that lets you print the PDF directly to Yoink, a handy Mac utility that I reviewed earlier this week. Here’s what you need to do to make Yoink show up in the ‘Print to PDF’ option list.

    1. Create an an alias to Yoink by selecting it in the Finder and typing CMD+L or right-clicking and selecting ‘Create Alias’.
    2. Open /Users/yourname/Library/PDF Services. Remember that the Library folder only shows up in the Finder’s Go menu if you hold down Option.
    3. Drag your Yoink alias into the PDF Services folder.
    4. Now when you print a PDF, one of the options will be Yoink. Select it and the PDF will immediately show up on your Yoink shelf. From there you can drop it into any apps that can accept PDFs.

    SHORTCUTS CORNER

    Get help and suggestions for your iOS shortcuts and productivity apps.

    Member Requests

    Question: I have several workflows that create a reminder, and I’m having trouble setting the reminder to go off at the right time. I know how to set a reminder to fire at a date/time relative to the current time (e.g. add 1 day & 2 hours), and I know how to set it to fire on a fixed date/time, but what I want to do is have it set to a relative day and a fixed time – e.g. tomorrow at 10am, or in 2 days at 4pm. How could I do that? Bonus points if it works both with Reminders and with Due. (Mark Miller, @MarkDMill)

    This was tricky to put together due to the lack of a proper natural language parsing engine in Workflow, but I came up with a solution that does what you’re looking for.

    Essentially, I created a workflow that asks you for a “natural language” command that can be formatted as follows:

    • today at 4 pm
    • Today at 5:20am
    • 2 days at 4pm
    • Tomorrow at 10:30am
    • tomorrow at 12 PM

    As you can see, you can put in the amount of days in the future, or today and tomorrow (both uppercase and lowercase Ts are supported), followed by “at time”. The time can be represented with minutes or not, and it accepts variations of AM, PM, am, and pm, with or without a space after the hour/minute number.

    The workflow does two things: it matches the first part of the sentence (the amount of days or the words today/tomorrow) and it matches the “at time” string after it. Both Reminders and Due support this kind of speech-like time format, so we don’t have to apply any conversion to the time value after it’s been captured by a Match Text action.

    The conversion that does happen, however, is for the date part. As you can see in the first Match Text action at the top, a regular expression looks for either a digit (the \d token) or a series of words separated by a pipe character. The matched digit or word is then parsed by multiple conditional blocks that add the necessary amount of days in the future to the current date. In the case of “today”, the current date is left as is. At the end, the adjusted date is combined with “at time” and you’re given the option to create a reminder in Reminders or Due. You’ll have to change the Title field of both actions to modify the name of the reminder – you can add an ‘Ask When Run’ token, for instance.

    While this workflow is quite convoluted (especially because I couldn’t figure out how to reduce the number of If blocks to accept either lowercase or uppercase words), it’s a nice one in that you can modify it with your own words in addition to “today” and “tomorrow”. To do so, add more pipe-separated words to the first Match Text action, create If blocks accordingly, and adjust the date like I did for the included examples.

    This workflow is far from having an in-depth natural language engine in Workflow, but it also showcases the flexibility you can achieve in the app with some imagination. You can download the workflow here.

    Question: Is there a workflow for cropping music? For example, you downloaded a music file and you just need the music from 1:30 to 2:40. (Christoph Schulz)

    Yes. Workflow’s Trim Video action is also capable of trimming audio files, which means you can set up a workflow that receives a file from an action extension, brings up the trimming interface (which isn’t too full-featured but gets the job done), and saves everything to an audio file. I have put together a workflow that converts the trimmed “video” to M4A with Encode Media, asks you for a name of the new file, and then brings up an Open In menu.

    You can download the workflow here.

    Question: I’m looking for a quicker way to save my emails/webpages as PDFs. My current workflow is thus: Airmail>Create PDF action>Share Sheet>‘Copy to PDF Expert’. Within PDF Expert I have to close the PDF, select Edit, and then rename the PDF. Once the file is renamed, I hit Edit>select the file>Open In>‘Copy to [BitTorrent] Sync’.

    This workflow works just fine but I’m hoping to cut out the PDF Expert middle step. What happens is I end up with all these files in PDF Expert that I don’t have any more use for. Is there something I could run via Workflow to rename the file in place? (Matthew Janssen, @mttjj)

    This can be easily done by using Set Name, an unsung hero of Workflow’s action library. Set Name allows you to supply a name to use for whatever data or file has been passed as input. This way, with just two actions, we can create a workflow that asks you to type a document’s name, which will then be used as the new name for the PDF – in this case, generated by Airmail. So, tap ‘Create PDF’ in Airmail, run the workflow, enter a name, and choose the destination app from the Open In menu. You’ll end up with a newly renamed PDF in your app of choice.

    You can download the workflow here.

    Question: I recently switched from Scrivener to Ulysses and am a longtime user of 2Do. I’ve also started using Workflow. I’m finding myself using Ulysses more and more to start personal emails (like the old letter writing) and keep minutes of meetings and all sorts of things in addition to the long form writing I used to do in Scrivener.

    What I’m finding, though, is I lose track of what I have to finish, and I wondered if there was a way of using the callback system of Ulysses and run a Workflow that sends the callback link of a sheet to 2Do in the link field so I can be reminded of what needs to be completed. (Deborah, @djaneb)

    There isn’t a way to launch a workflow from Ulysses starting with the sheet’s identifier, but we can work around it if we add a step to the process.

    First, select the sheet you want to save as a task, swipe on it, and select More. Tap ‘Share’, then ‘Copy URL’ from the share sheet. We have to copy the sheet’s unique URL if we want to be able to create a task in 2Do that will return to it later.

    Then, tap Share from the sheet itself (in the text editor) and run the workflow. If the sheet is in Markdown and you share it as text, the workflow will scan the first title line (formatted as #Document Title) and use it as the name of a new task in 2Do, which is nice.

    The sheet URL identifier you previously copied will be used as a browse action in 2Do, so you’ll be able to long-tap the newly created task and hit its link icon to instantly return to the sheet in Ulysses.

    You can download the workflow here.

    Question: Following Federico’s review of Airmail 1.1, I moved over from Spark. One reason is that (like another good third-party mail app, Dispatch), Airmail now generates its own message URL (beginning with airmail://). The challenge, for me, is with 2Do and its Email to 2Do feature. The problem is that 2Do seems to capture, by default, the message URL associated with Apple’s Mail app (beginning with message:). Is there a way to configure 2Do (or, for that matter, Airmail) so that 2Do captures the Airmail URL instead? The alternative is to use Airmail’s “Send to 2Do” action, which is much less efficient. (Jeff Pooley, @jeffersonpooley)

    Unfortunately, Jeff, there’s no way to configure 2Do or Airmail to handle these URLs differently, and I’ve also been using the 2Do integration in Airmail because I’ve come across this problem myself. However, your question pushed me to experiment with an idea.

    Both Apple Mail and Airmail use the same unique message identifier under the hood. An Apple Mail message URL looks like this:

    message:<C20A0B23-2074-4A77-899D-65256EE3B731@icloud.com>

    Whereas an Airmail one looks like this:

    airmail://message?mail=viticci%40macstories.net&messageid=C20A0B23-2074-4A77-899D-65256EE3B731%40icloud.com

    You can see how Airmail needs an additional email address parameter for your account, but everything else is the same as Apple’s URL format.

    I put together a workflow that you can run in 2Do on a message captured by Email to 2Do. Select a task, hit Share > More Options, then run the workflow; it’ll scan the task’s text for an Apple Mail message URL, match its ID (with a regular expression), and it’ll reconstruct an Airmail URL to open the message in the app.

    The downside is that, because of Airmail’s URL requirements, you’ll have to pick the email address the captured message was sent to, otherwise Airmail will hang on launch. As you can see, I put in a list of my email addresses, which you’ll have to modify.

    It’s not an ideal solution, but it’s a nice workaround to open email messages captured with Email to 2Do into Airmail. You can download the workflow here.

    Submit a Shortcut Request

    WEEKLY Q&A

    Your weekly correspondence with the MacStories team.

    Question: Hello Federico & staff, my question is about Evernote. I’ve used it – especially as digital archive – since its debut and I know that the company had some troubles during the past years. Do you still use it? In which way? What is your judgment on the Evernote ecosystem? (Luigi Mandraccio, @lmandraccio)

    The short answer: I no longer use Evernote and I’m all-in on Notes and cloud storage services to hold my notes and documents.

    The longer answer is: I think Evernote lost their focus over the past couple of years with an increasingly bloated app that tried to be many things without excelling at anything. And in the process, the company ignored glaring problems of the core experience such as a lackluster text editor, desktop features missing on iOS, and lack of Markdown support. When Apple introduced Notes for iOS 9, I saw a well-considered update with unique features such as drawing and a powerful share extension with excellent support for links and append mode. I switched to it, and I haven’t looked back because it does what I need (even if it doesn’t have Markdown support), it’s fast, and it’s polished.

    Now, I know that Evernote has been busy re-focusing on what they do best and they’ve shown some progress lately, but I feel like it’s too late for me. Just like I wouldn’t switch to a third-party web browser on iOS because I love Safari so much, I think I’ll be fine with Notes going forward.

    For more on this, check out the Notes section of my iOS 9 review from last year.

    Sadly, I have to agree with Federico. I’ve been an Evernote user since May 2008, and a paid member for almost all of that period. But this year I gave up, and have been using a mix of Notes for basic stuff and OneNote for my study notes.

    As Federico said, the Evernote app has become bloated with ancillary features whilst the core note taking experience remains virtually unchanged and woefully dated.

    I really hope Evernote can shake things up, but after years of inaction, I don’t have a lot of hope.

    Have you got a question for the MacStories team? If you do, you can submit it here. Your question can be about almost anything, it doesn’t need to be related to iOS or Apple.

    Submit your own question

    ONGOING DEVELOPMENT

    Trying new things, seeing what works, and discarding what doesn't.

    Knowing When to Get Help

    One of the pitfalls of being an indie developer is thinking you can, or should, do everything yourself. It’s understandable – after all, one of the advantages of being an indie is self-reliance. It keeps costs down and makes you more nimble and responsive to change. The trouble is, no one is equally good at everything that goes into making an app. The hard part is being brutally honest with yourself, knowing where your weak points are, and when to get help.

    To complicate the calculus further, just because you aren’t exceptional at something doesn’t necessarily mean you should hire someone to help out. That’s just one factor. Cost is also critical, especially at the front end, before your app has launched and you have only a vague sense of what your return on it might be. That makes it important to limit spending to things that are high-impact.

    For me that was design. I think I have an eye for good design, but I know I’m not very good at creating it. To show you what I mean, I dug up some cringe-worthy Blink screenshots and an early icon design. Other than a handful of my earliest beta testers, no one has seen these, and while they are a little embarrassing to share, that’s offset the satisfaction of knowing that I knew better than to ship them.

    First, the icon. Icons are incredibly important and I’m no good at creating them myself, which is problematic. Your app’s icon is the first impression most people get of your app. You want it to convey something about your app and its quality. Here’s my feeble attempt on the left, four early prototypes created by Frank Towers and Frank’s final design on the right:

    Evolution of an icon: My attempt, prototypes by Frank Towers, and Frank’s final design

    You can probably see what I was trying to do. I wanted to convey that Blink is an app for writers and has Markdown support, so I used a typewriter-style font and square brackets. It’s not the worst icon I’ve created or seen, but it’s not great either. There is too much going on with the colors and drop shadows – it looks amateurish because it is. In contrast, Frank’s design lets you know the app is about linking without hitting you over the head with it. His color choice is simple and stands out nicely on a variety of iOS wallpapers, works nicely at multiple screen resolutions, and there’s a subtle gradient that is barely perceptible, but works well without screaming at you.

    I faired a little better with Blink’s interface. Searching iTunes for media and displaying the results lends itself to an obvious interface pattern and sticking with mostly stock interface elements, I did a passable job. But I got a little carried away with the colors again, bringing a combination of blue and green from the icon into the app. With Frank’s help, we came up with a cleaner color scheme that actually has more colors, but ones that are variations on a common theme and complementary to each other, consisting of three different greens, two shades of grey, and white. Here are some early screenshots and their shipping equivalents for comparison:

    Beta 1.0
    Blink today

    I’m sure you noticed the stacked buttons at the bottom of the beta’s detail view. What was I thinking? I don’t remember, other than I was probably just being lazy because before UIStackView, properly laying out buttons horizontally for all size classes was surprisingly hard. I knew it looked awful and eventually I rolled up my sleeves and did the work to get it right, but it helped to get a push from Frank and others.

    It’s those ‘others’ who were also key to helping with the late-stage development process. I had a small group of initial testers whose opinions I respected and trusted, and who helped shape the final look and feature set of Blink. After working on Blink for months, I had become blind to some of its big-picture shortcomings. I was caught up in the minute details and had lost the ability to step back and take a more holistic view of the app.

    Bringing in a few other people to look at my app and give me honest, objective feedback made a big difference. But at the time, giving them what was to my mind a broken, inadequate app was extremely hard, as I described to Myke Hurley on Behind the App. It was more gut-wrenching than shipping because I cared what my testers thought about the app I had poured months of work into.

    As hard as that was, I wouldn’t do it any other way. It was the final push I needed to get Blink over the finish line. Instead of being something I toiled at in my spare time, the app was a real thing being used by others whose time I didn’t want to waste, and whose opinions I trusted. It was well-timed external pressure that helped me see the project to the end.

    At this point, I think we are probably in agreement about my design skills, but this isn’t about design. My point is that it’s important to step back and figure out what your strengths are, but just as importantly, what your weaknesses are, and to evaluate where external help will have the greatest impact on your app. I like to think I can do it all too, but the reality is that I’m really good at a few things, passable at many, and awful at the rest. Knowing one from the other gives you an advantage over anyone who hasn’t bothered to take that hard look at themselves.

    Previous Ongoing Development Topics: (6) Reddit App Takedowns Expose Serious App Review Flaws’ (5) If You Can’t Find Time, Make It (4) Telling a Story by Sharing Your Expertise, (3) Filling a Need: Scratching More Than Your Own Itch, (2) Mind the Gap: Finding Your Place on the App Store, (1) The Elements of App Store Attention.

    INTERESTING LINKS

    Great reads and links from around the web.

    Ole Begemann’s thoughts on the new Apple TV after six months. Hard to disagree with his comments on the remote.

    Airtable, a genius reinvention of the classic spreadsheet for the modern age, has launched a new calendar view that aims to rethink how you browse date-based entries. More on the design process here.

    Tim Nahumck on how he put together his own journaling workflow with Drafts, Workflow, and Dropbox. DIY, indeed.

    Gyroscope, a beautiful way to visualize your activity by connecting to various services, has launched multiplayer and leaderboards to compete with friends and compare stats.

    Downloading subtitles for movies and TV shows with Hazel for Mac and some Python goodness.

    If you think the people behind emoji have a relaxed professional life full of 😎 and 💯, think again.

    August’s Siri-controlled smart lock powered by HomeKit is now available, though in limited supply.

    Sketch Runner wants to be like Alfred for Sketch: it lets you search through all your available plugins and Sketch menu commands, jump to any artwork or layer in a document, insert symbols, and lots more.

    APP DEBUTS

    Noteworthy new app releases and updates, handpicked by the MacStories team.

    Dashbird

    Dashbird is a new iPhone app to comprehensively track stats for any Twitter account. In addition to tracking data for your account, in fact, you can check on interesting stats for friends’ accounts, competitors, brands, and more. Stats include busiest days by posting activity, popular content, mentions, and more. Worth a look.

    Other

    Other by Daniel Farrelly lets you quickly message things to contacts you’re always in touch with. The app lets you set up message shortcuts and it supports a share extension and 3D Touch – plus, it’s free to try from the App Store.

    Talkshow

    Talkshow (not to be confused with John Gruber’s The Talk Show) aims to be like “texting in public”, a sort of unidirectional public chatting space where “hosts” can talk to each other and people can observe their conversation. Intriguing concept, but we won’t be switching away from our Telegram channel. More on Talkshow here.

    Hesperus

    Hesperus is a new HomeKit manager for all your connected home accessories. The app supports a wide range of HomeKit devices, allowing you to turn lights on and off, organize zones and rooms, set up scenes and actions, and much more – with an elegant interface.

    STRAW POLL

    Opinions on Apple and technology generally, from Club MacStories members.

    Welcome to Straw Poll!

    We’ve been thinking of ways to get more community involvement, and so we’re going to start sharing a poll every week or so in the Telegram MacStories Lounge. They’ll be pretty brief and informal, but we think they might also be really interesting.

    We posted the first Straw Poll yesterday, and here are the results!

    1. iPad as a Primary Computer

    Written Responses

    We asked what it would take for the iPad to become people’s primary computer, and these were some of the recurring comments:

    • Xcode for iPad (this was overwhelmingly the most frequently cited impediment)
    • Other development tools
    • Pro video and photo editing apps
    • A lot of people rely on a particular specialised program which doesn’t exist for iOS yet
    • Photoshop and other Adobe Creative Suite apps
    • Microsoft Office with the advanced features that it offers on the desktop (e.g. full support for pivot tables in Excel)
    • Better file management
    • More power, more ports, more extensibility (e.g. external monitors), more inputs (e.g. trackpad)
    • Money to afford one

    HOME SCREENS

    Friends of MacStories share their iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch Home screens.

    Shai Lottem

    Twitter: @shailottem. Club MacStories member.

    I’m an Electrical Engineering student in Technion, Israel. I’ve been an Apple nerd for 5 years, and my iPhone 6 is the best device I’ve ever owned.

    My current layout is one I thought of deeply and for aspects such as muscle memory, reachability and visual balance. I’m easily distracted, so I have the ‘Reduce Motion’ setting enabled, the app icon badges disabled (except on Fantastical and Wunderlist) and my wallpaper black to help me focus. I used _David Smith’s webpage trick to add black icons to the first and fifth rows, so the icons won’t look like an unfinished list like iOS devices’ Home screens seem to me, but more like a well ordered group.

    The apps I have on the first screen are those I really appreciate and use on a daily basis. I don’t use folders at all, as their animations are too slow, so the rest of the ~65 apps I have are arranged by importance, and sorted alphabetically in each screen. Also, it’s easier for me to delete unnecessary ones when they are not hiding inside a folder.

    These are my favorite apps:

    1Password is the glue keeping my digital life from crumbling. I don’t know what I would’ve done without it. If 1Password is first, then Dropbox has to be second. It is the most reliable syncing service out there, and I depend on it greatly.

    Drafts is my productivity machine. Just about everything I write begins in Drafts. It is so versatile, and yet so polished. This is one of the best apps I’ve ever had. Everybody praises Notes.app, but it doesn’t suits my needs, so I use it only to draw the occasional sketch.

    Fantastical is the best calendaring app on iOS. I use a Drafts action to quickly add events as I plan my day. It is a precious tool for me.

    I love music, and listen to a wide variety of genres. That’s why Music.app got the most important spot on my Home screen – right in the middle of the dock . I like to have high quality files I organize myself on iTunes, add lyrics to, and make smart playlists of, based on ratings, play counts and more. My iPhone is still syncing happily with my Mac every day.

    For when I don’t feel like music or have no headphones, Overcast is a must-have for podcast listeners. This one is right up there with Drafts – exceptionally engineered, thoughtfully designed, and unapologetically indie. Just how I like my apps.

    For a few years now, I never had an email client I was perfectly happy with on iOS. Outlook comes pretty close, but it’s missing some small things keeping me from using just it. For now I’m trying Mail.app again, but I’m considering buying Airmail in the near future.

    Workflow is incredibly powerful. Most of the studies-related work is done on my Mac, so occasionally I will find a useful workflow, but usually it’s just a super fun playground for me.

    Safari is the best browser both on iOS and on OS X. I agree with Federico that it’s the best built-in app on iOS. I use the web versions of YouTube and Facebook instead of the official apps, because I don’t like them.

    For reading articles and following the news, Unread is one of those apps I really love for its design and typography. Lately I haven’t been successful in keeping pace with all of the RSS feeds I followed, so I’ve removed all of them from Feedly and wrote a workflow for saving links to it from Tweetbot, which is currently on the second screen to keep me from checking it constantly. Despite that, I might “upgrade” Tweetbot to the first screen if it doesn’t work out.

    For tracking expenses I use both the excellent Scanbot for scanning receipts and saving them to a Dropbox folder, and Next for keeping an eye on my spendings.

    In addition to all of those, I’m using Byword for syncing with nvALT on my Mac, Copied for not losing anything I’ve, well, copied, Day One for journaling and thought-processing, Moovit for public transport, Notability for when Notes.app is not enough, PCalc for anything I can’t calculate in my head, Pedometer++ for much-needed motivation to go out and take a walk, Sleep Cycle for sleep tracking, WhatsApp for communicating with friends and family and Wunderlist for keeping track of my assignments.

    I hope you enjoyed my Home screen tour!

    If you think you have an interesting iPhone or iPad Home screen, please feel free to submit it! Simply attach a screenshot of your Home screen and in one or two sentences explain what makes it interesting. Please do not send us a full description, we will contact you if we want to feature your Home screen.

    Submit your own Home Screen

    PREVIOUSLY, ON MACSTORIES

    Our top stories from the past week.

    Apple Q2 2016 Results: $50.6 Billion Revenue, 51.2 Million iPhones, 10.3 Million iPads Sold

    Apple Posts New iPhone 6s Ads Highlighting Touch ID, 4K Video

    OmniFocus for iOS Adds Deep Automation Features

    Better File Juggling with Yoink

    Apple Announces New Apple Music API Logitech Introduces iPad Pro Smart Connector Charging Dock